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Ideology Vs Experience

By RK
A few weeks ago I witnessed a battle. One between ideology and experience. The debate was about communism (or maybe socialism?). Two friends came to the table with what seems an innocuous discussion about what "lived" communism was about. It was interesting because both parties had a different conception of what communism is. One, whose family had labored under a corrupt communist regime and another whose family for generations had believed enough in the ideology to give up their privileges for common good.
This instance, in retrospect provided me with an interesting lens on what the dialectic within the communist culture would be like. It seems almost akin to the debate within religion that between ideology and experience; between the goodness of all things spiritual and the perversity of human nature. It seems to me that socialism and communism are parallel to the concept of philanthropy in religion and religious fundamentalism.

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